Wednesday, October 29, 2014

One more block; the engine talks

Today at work, I gave the kids a reading quiz that I wrote (two adapted Aesop's fables, plus the questions), oversaw their partnered reading and looked at a few reading reaction pages (problem and solution), then went over homework. An hour and half goes by fast; what I just wrote out really doesn't seem like it would take all that time, but it does.

In adapting the fables, by the way, I took the one about the milkmaid and reworked it so that it was about a young man dreaming of using his money to buy a fine new tractor and lording it over his neighbors and spilling the milk as he acted out his fancies, rather than a girl tossing her head at suitors. The original is (David Brent voice) a bit sexist, innit?

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I literally had no idea the World Series was going on until I saw the CNN headline about the winner just now.

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Saw The Vikings (1958), surely one of the worst major motion pictures ever made by Hollywood. From the bad acting, to the atrocious dialogue, to the off-kilter casting (Ernest Borgnine as the Viking Chief! Haw!), to the movie's bafflingly propagandistic association with a Germanic, proto-fascist people at the expense of our Good Old Ally England.

Among many of the unintentionally funny scenes: Monk makes sign of cross. Kirk Douglas says "Take your magic elsewhere, holy man" before pushing him to the ground. Ha! I don't know why that's funny, but it is. That's funnier than a rotating chair.

I am still watching "The Walking Dead." It is preposterous and thrilling!

I have also watched every episode available on Netflix of "Comic Book Men," a "reality" show about Kevin Smith's comic book shop in Red Bank, NJ. It is staged and pretty goofy, but I am enough of a nerd to binge-watch it with at least one eye open. Speaking of unintentionally funny, Jason Mewes (Jay, of Jay and Silent Bob fame) attempting a believable reaction shot to anything is hilarious.